313 Legends

Lily Tomlin is a proud Detroit Cass Tech alumna who, like a phoenix, rose from the ashes of Detroit’s working-class side to become one of America’s most beloved and versatile character actresses.

Known for her unforgettable impersonations, razor-sharp wit, and barrier-breaking presence, Lily Tomlin has taken on every kind of role over the course of her career, from phone operators to bag ladies and backwoods philosophers.

That said, she’s always been a Detroit girl at heart – and the city has never stopped claiming her.

Kristen Bell is sunshine personified.

With a voice like morning, a wit unlike any other, and a strong Detroit work ethic that led her all the way to Broadway, she’s a contradiction in the best sense:

• Sweet yet sharp
• Wholesome yet subversive
• A Disney princess with the comedic timing of a stand-up assassin

And yet, beneath the well-crafted Hollywood persona is Kristen at her core: a jester in the form of a little girl who learned early how to laugh through pain and turn a raised eyebrow into a multi-million dollar career.

Keegan-Michael “Key” does more than perform: he becomes.

One minute, he’s an inner-city, manic substitute teacher mispronouncing names as if casting a spell. 

The next, he’s acting out rage so realistically you’d think it was real.

Whether he’s a Shakespearean noble, a cartoon lemur, or a dejected motivational coach, Key’s ability to transform into the characters he plays is second to none.

Long before the whole world knew his name, David Alan Grier was just a Detroit boy soaking up the sounds of jazz, protest, and gospel underneath the shadow of Motown and the Motor City’s burning contradictions.

He came up not in comedy clubs, but in classical theater – on wooden stages with scripts in hand – the kind of place where you had to earn the spotlight with skill, timing, and resilience.

It would be there that he’d learn how to switch masks again and again – all without ever losing his sense of identity. 

In a city known for reinventing itself, Shaka Senghor fit right in:

A man not broken by his past but rebuilt by it brick by brick.

He was not brought up in comfort.

He received no grace.

Yet, he would go on to become one of Detroit’s most urgent and unflinching voices.

To call Satori Shakoor – birth name Jeanette McGruder – a mere storyteller is a significant understatement.

She is a woman who takes her listeners on journeys…one who cracks open the room and pulls out the messy, aching, truth hidden in the shadows.

In a city where black voices have often been silenced, ignored, or commodified, Satori became a model for storytelling as medicine, making Detroit pause to listen – and feel safe enough to finally speak.

In a place where resilience is the name of the game, Mike Duggan was the practical force steering Detroit out of bankruptcy onto the path of renewal.

Not a visionary in the conventional sense, but a meticulous executor, Duggan’s tenure was defined by data-driven decisions and a determination to bring functionality back to a broken city.

For a city that is often talked about instead of listened to, Lauren Hood has turned the script upside down.

She doesn’t bulldoze, she doesn’t boast.

She asks us to listen, reflect, and reimagine.

Hood is more than a planner or facilitator.

She is Detroit’s civic conscience – a determined woman who asks tougher questions than most are willing to answer – one whose work is not in development, but alignment: in space, memory, justice, and soul.

Nicknamed “The Angel of Jazz,”Gretchen Valade was the rare kind of philanthropist who did not merely write checks – she wrote entire chapters of Detroit’s cultural history.

Hers was the kind of legacy that stuck.

You would swear the room was shaking if you heard JoAnn Watson speak – not from volume, but from conviction.

Whether it was in pulpits or protests or behind the council dais, she spoke as if every syllable had an ancestor behind it.

If Detroit had a conscience – she was the one bringing it out.

Before the speeches, before the manifestos, before the books, the movement houses, the pan-African conferences – James Boggs was just a Black man with grease under his nails showing up for a shift at Chrysler.

A poet with a punch card, a theorist with a timecard. 

He didn’t talk about revolution from a podium – he lived it right on the shop floors of Detroit.

Change was something Grace Lee Boggs learned to live with. 

She forged a path few dared to tread across the 20th century’s most volatile decades, which saw the intersection of race, class, gender, and philosophy. 

She wasn’t loud. 

She wasn’t flashy. 

But she was determined – a soft-eyed intellectual warrior with a strong will and a big heart.

If Henry Ford was the cold-blooded engineer of Detroit’s motor revolution, then William Crapo Durant was its wild-eyed carnival barker – a showman, a gambler, and a man who built and lost empires with the same blinding stare.

The car was not invented by him. 

He barely enjoyed driving. 

And yet, Durant saw something more in the auto industry – a future filled with gears, glass, and unstoppable ambition.

With that in mind, he was creating more than just a car company when he started General Motors in 1908.

He was imagining capitalism in motion.

Before the Chrysler name became a badge on millions of American cars, it belonged to a man with grease under his nails, railroad grit in his bones, and a vision too big for anyone else’s garage.

Walter Percy Chrysler did not set out to be a titan. 

He was a locomotive mechanic, a lifelong tinkerer, and a hands-on problem solver with no patience for wasting time. 

For what he lacked in polish, he made up for in audacity and torque — qualities that would eventually help him build one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers from the ground up.

He was not born into wealth. 

He did not inherit an empire. 

He simply ran circles around the men who had. 

Peter Karmanos Jr. did not inherit a legacy – he wrote his own in bold code – one backed by ice shavings and quiet generosity.

Raised by Greek immigrants who owned a small Detroit diner, Karmanos learned early on that anything worth having required hard work and determination – a lesson he took and expanded into an entire empire.

In 1973, long before Detroiters were whispering of “comebacks” or “innovation corridors,” Karmanos founded Compuware.

Not in Silicon Valley, but in the Midwest, a place most known for its bankruptcy and blight. 

He went on to rip the city apart and construct a tech fortress from the inside out – not for acclaim, but for possibility.